[AKN #66] Overcoming morning routine addiction
LAUGH: Mitch Hedberg, LOVE: The chip shortage
Sup homies?
Before I begin, I would like to make a note about last week’s edition of the newsletter.
A lot of the articles I write in the LIVE section are “the advice I wish I read 5-10 years ago.”
This one was no different.
A younger version of myself was devoutly committed to a new magic bullet diet/exercise solution every other week.
I would do whatever it took to avoid facing the reality: I wasn’t making progress because I wasn’t consistently doing the right thing.
The easiest way to avoid that truth?
Keep convincing yourself the “right thing” is different.
Find serenity in indulging your newest fantasy that the Zone Diet, I mean Keto, I mean intermittent fasting, I mean ALL OF THEM COMBINED is the REAL solution to your problem.
It’s definitely not the fact that you consumed 3,000 calories every day for the last month…
I wish someone came into my life at that time and stressed the importance of nailing the fundamentals — such as good nutrition — before focusing on advanced tactics — like purchasing bare foot running shoes.
I would have saved A LOT of time.
The thought of how much time I wasted frustrates me.
When I embody that mind space of when I was heavy, I speak in a very flippant tone around the subject of being fat.
This is not a very popular way to talk.
It can grate against someone’s well intentioned sensibilities and lead them to write me saying that I am “not being kind” or “you don’t know the kinds of struggles everyone else is battling.”
So I would like to address that.
I’m very sympathetic to people going through the weight loss struggle because I went through that struggle.
I wrote about that nearly 7 (!) years ago.
I remember it well and I don’t wish it on anyone.
Which is exactly why I write articles like last weeks.
When I look back on that time, I believe the reason it took me so long to solve my problem is because I was hamstrung in two ways.
One, I was not able to discern truth for myself.
Food is emotional and these emotions blinded me from looking at the objective reality: I was doing this to myself.
Second, no one told me the truth.
A common observation by people who have lost a ton of weight is “I can’t believe no one said anything.”
People are generally conflict avoidant so they will sugarcoat reality to avoid giving uncomfortable feedback. We say we are doing this because we are being “nice.”
However, being “nice” lead to me internalizing “this is just who I am” or “I’m big boned.”
Which — in my opinion — is a cruel world view to allow someone to carry.
I overwhelmingly look back on that moment in time and wish someone just told me the truth: I was focusing on the wrong things.
I didn’t need to do overhead squat at the gym until exhaustion and then run a mile, I needed to eat 2000 calories a day of the appropriately balanced macronutrients.
The thing I MOST needed to hear is “you need to eat a salad” — which is my tongue in cheek way of saying “nutrition is the fundamental piece to examine first.”
Sure. There is the objection that this older version of myself was not in the appropriate emotional head space to receive honest feedback.
This is fair criticism.
But I always come back to the fact that it was when I realized my weight was a changeable characteristic that I changed it.
Like I have said before, your world is a single month long experiment away from being completely different.
So if literally one person out there reads any article I write about my weight loss journey and thinks “oh shit maybe that’s me, maybe I can change too”, I am at peace with the fact that some of you may think I am mean.
So I will not apologize for my opinion, but I do sincerely hope I have helped better contextualize my opinion for you.
I guarantee we are on the same side, we simply disagree on the approach.
On the bright side, most people agree that Ted Lasso Season 2 sucked.
We are the silent majority.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: Overcoming Morning Routine Addiction
If you have spent any time at all reading any personal development book, you have heard some version of “morning routines matter.”
The logic goes: during the morning, you are able to focus on ANYTHING you would like for one to two hours removed from the obligations of every day life. So if utilized correctly, the RIGHT routine executed morning after morning can change the trajectory of your life.
I agree. This is absolutely great advice.
However, where I think people go wrong is when they try to follow a template for the “optimal” morning as if a cookie cutter routine found in today’s most popular self help book is going to be the magic bullet that propels your life forward.
The existence of the “perfect morning routine” is provably ridiculous if you simply follow the progression of in vogue morning routine advice.
The ever shifting mish mash of slapdick routines ends up shifting from extreme to extreme on even the simplest subjects like:
WHAT TO DRINK: Wake up and drink a glass of water…er I mean green smoothie…er actually I meant probiotics.
WHAT TO EAT: Eat a hearty breakfa…on second thought, don’t eat until noon. Also make sure you are only eating protein and fat.
HOW MUCH TO EXERCISE: Exercise vigorously when you wake up…actually don’t exercise…well I mean moderate exercise is shown to really stimulate brain activity!
HOW MUCH CAFFEINE TO DRINK: Drink coffee…no I meant tea…well actually how about not consuming coffee at all until 10a because neuroscience shows…
And on and on…
Morning routine advice is a siren song to many devotees of the personal development community — especially the Optimale.
I used to forever adjust the amount of time I exercised, meditated, journaled, etc as I embarked on my search for Morning Routine Nirvana™
I now look back on that time and consider the pursuit a fool’s errand.
I was asking the wrong question.
The question I should have asked was not “what is the best use of ANY person’s time each morning?”
I should have been asking “what is the best use of MY time each morning?”
The answer to the first question is a process crafted to optimize for some metric that I do not care about. It is the routine that comes out of some experiment across hundreds of people.
The answer to the second question is a process crafted to achieve a goal I set for myself. It is crafted from my personal experimentation (sample size = 1) and takes into account the time I have to spend and my psychology.
When you require a specific solution, don’t use a generic template
A thought experiment will help make my point.
Let’s say that you want to get a new job.
If you follow the template from one of the most famous books on morning routines, every morning you wake up and — in sequential order — meditate, read your affirmations aloud, visualize yourself achieving your goals, exercise, read, and write (this is real advice by the way).
But did any of this move you closer to finding a new job?
No.
Which is brutal because you still need to make progress on that goal and you work from 8a-6p.
Imagine how much better it would be if you instead used the morning to look for a new role, reformat your resume, reach out to people who work at the company you want to work for or practice answering interview questions.
It obviously feels a lot better to procrasturbate your entire morning away by looking in the mirror and audibly reminding yourself that you are a good man who deserves love, but it is also time you are not spending finding a new job.
That is why I have found that morning routines are best constructed around the most important goal you are trying to achieve.
How to establish a morning routine that works for you
After years of jumping from morning routine to morning routine, I have settled on a process which helps me feel like I have a successful morning every work day morning.
Figure out ONE thing I want to make progress on which I otherwise would not get done during the day.
Whenever I find myself failing to establish a morning routine it is because I have decided to set the bar for “success” too high.
For example, if I find myself saying “I am going to write, meditate, and exercise every morning”, I know with 100% certainty it is only a matter of time before I completely abandon it.
That routine is not realistic given my schedule. I do not have that type of time.
So I need to pick one thing.
Examples of things I have picked in the past:
I want to lose weight.
I want to become a better writer.
Turn progress on that goal into an executable process.
My mind hates vague, but it loves specific.
To capitalize on this psychological quirk, I turn “progress” on my goal into a step by step process I just need to wake up and follow.
I want to lose weight becomes:
I will do the following 45 minute weight routine tomorrow morning.
I will prepare breakfast and lunch for the day tomorrow morning.
I want to become a better writer becomes:
I will execute 15 minutes of stream of consciousness writing to help establish the routine of writing in “my voice” every single day.
I will execute 15 minutes of journal prompt writing to help build the writing about a new subject muscle.
Go the fuck to sleep the night before.
A morning routine doesn't happen without going to sleep.
When I was in college I would always find myself setting alarms for 6a and then just sleeping through them.
I walked away from that experience thinking “I really need to be more disciplined.”
I was stupid.
My problem wasn’t my discipline. My problem was that I was drinking an AMPED energy drink at 7p, staying awake until 1a, and expecting to wake up at 6a.
LOL. Yea right kid. Best of luck with that.
Now I go to sleep 8 hours before I wake up...mostly.
Sometimes I fuck that up too tbh, but I always try to find my way back to 8 hours of sleep.
Work on my ONE thing day over day.
I have to avoid the urge to constantly shift my routine.
If I am working on the most important thing to me right now, I just need to keep working on it whilst occasionally looking up and reflecting on whether or not it is moving me in the right direction.
If I am moving in the wrong direction, I need to go back to Step 2 and adjust.
My morning routines are never perfect on my first run through. I need to adjust, experiment, and figure out what works/is sustainable.
But once I figure out the right sequence, it is time to just keep following through.
Adjust my routine if I have a new priority.
My morning routine does — and should — change.
Sometimes my priorities change. I have a new goal or a new most important thing I need to get done in the short term.
The key here is changing it for the right reasons (ie: this is a real change in priority or I am not making the progress I would like to make rather than I am simply changing it up because I am bored.)
And that is my procedure.
Executing this routine morning over morning leaves me feeling like I got a lot more done than I used to and sets me up to grow and change the routine as my priorities change.
It is nice. Though I do miss telling myself I am pretty every morning…
Laugh: Mitch Hedberg, The Master of the Dad Joke
Mitch Hedberg was a unique comedian whose style is best described by the following YouTube comment:
TheLibraQueen 1 year ago: His humor is a mixture of dad jokes and big brain stoner thoughts and I’m here for it
If you have never heard him, you are in for a treat.
He is pure one to two line nonsense delivered by the perfect personality which somehow makes his objectively lame jokes endearing and hilarious.
LOVE: The chip shortage
We ain’t talking about Pringles.
We talking about semiconductors.
Long story short, there is no end in sight for chip shortages.
“The shortages are going to continue indefinitely,” Brandon Kulik, head of Deloitte’s semiconductor industry practice, told Ars. “Maybe that doesn’t mean 10 years, but certainly we’re not talking about quarters. We’re talking about years.”
Why is there a chip shortage?
Same reason any shortage exists: a mismatch between demand and supply.
First, there is a VERY strong demand for semiconductors and printed circuit boards.
For one, people keep buying new phones, tablets, and laptops, and they continue to use network-heavy services like video streaming, video conferencing, and more, which increases data-center use. “Demand just keeps continuing to grow in general across nearly all markets,” Kulik said.
Second, there are new emerging bottlenecks in the supply chain.
That appetite has collided head-on with a variety of supply shortages. Recently, substrates that make up printed circuit boards have become scarce. Compared with advanced semiconductors, PCBs are relatively low-margin and easy to manufacture. Most chip companies don’t make their own, but without PCBs, semiconductors can’t talk to other chips in a computer. The companies that do make the boards don’t make a lot of profit that they can reinvest in expanding production.
The normal way to solve a bottleneck is to invest in expanding the capacity of your bottleneck, however here we have seen three major issues:
A series of fires have taken out a lot of the biggest manufacturers
In March, a fire tore through a fab owned by Renesas Electronics. The Japanese company was a key supplier for the automotive industry, and it was already working overtime to make up for the loss of capacity at Asahi Kasei Microdevices, another automotive supplier, which had a fire in one of its fabs in October 2020.
I am not sure why major fires keep happening at these places, but I am assuming it has something to do with the manufacturing process.
In all likelihood, it is probably a known issue that increases in probability of occurrence when you start rushing the process to meet excess demand.
Gavin Newsom would probably blame climate change though.
General shipping delays
Shipping delays that have plagued so many other businesses haven’t skipped the semiconductor industry, either. Chips frequently zip around the globe as they go from silicon wafer to final product.
Huge costs for bringing up new fabrication plants
It takes some incredible machinery to make the printed circuit boards we enjoy today and the machinery is extraordinarily expensive.
New fabs take years to build and optimize, and companies are hesitant to invest if they think surges in demand will be temporary. While demand is up, whether or not it will persist beyond the pandemic is unclear. Companies are loath to invest in a new fab if there’s a strong possibility that it won’t be running 70 percent of the time. Fabs are just too expensive.
“If you’re running at 60 or 70 percent utilization, you’re probably losing money,” Robert Maire, president of Semiconductor Advisors, told Ars.
Leading-edge fabs cost around $5 billion–$10 billion, multiple times what they cost a decade or two ago. As manufacturing techniques have advanced, the buildings themselves get more costly to construct, and the machines that make the chips have grown more expensive. The latest tools use extreme ultraviolet lithography, which is required to produce chips with features smaller than 7 nm, and they sell for upward of $120 million.
All in all, this is going to be a problem that takes years to solve so expect the cost of your cars and phones to increase.
Closing time
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
Mahalo,
Kevin